1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to assessing usability of a web site. In particular, this invention relates to the measurement of user success rates of accessing information of a web site.
2. Description of Related Art
Increasingly, the World Wide Web has become the information delivery mechanism of choice for both corporations and individuals users. The ubiquity of World Wide Web browsers and the push by many corporations to adopt common off the shelf technology (COTS) have all helped the World Wide Web become a required delivery option for most information systems.
However, although information sources are now more likely to be available to their intended audience through the World Wide Web, the access to relevant information is still limited by a user's ability to navigate the World Wide Web and the destination web site and to actively accumulate the required information. Many designers of web sites seek ways to quantify the user's experience in a web site. Using this information, one may design a web site suited for various tasks. For example, a web site designer of a county government tax assessors office site may assume any query will be related to county tax assessment. In contrast, the web site designer for an online department store needs to provide a user with access to product information ranging from toasters to jewelry. The web site designer of an internal corporate information site may need to provide access to corporate tax information, real estate holdings, business permits and/or health and safety records. Naturally, certain tasks are better addressed by one web site in comparison with another web site, and certain information needs are satisfied more easily by one web site than other web sites.
Accordingly, web site designers, information system managers and researchers are constantly developing new tools to gain understanding into the paths that users follow to obtain the information they need. For example, web site designers, researchers and web site banner advertisers seeking to place information on the most relevant web site have used a variety of techniques to analyze web log files. Web log files contain information concerning which web page referred the user to the site as well as which web pages were visited within the site. Information concerning the user's IP address and browser type is also frequently saved for review in the web log file. Tools such as INSIGHT™ from Accrue Corporation, ASTRA SITE MANAGER™ from Mercury Interactive provide a way to describe how users have traversed the web site in the past.
WebCriteria's Site Analysis product provides statistics accumulated through the use of the MAX™ software agent product. The MAX™ software agent traverses the web site to derive usability metrics from simulated browsing. However, the simulated browsing merely provides a random walk of a web site. Simulated browsing based on a random walk assumes the user's navigational choices at any juncture are random and simply ignores the presence of informational cues on each page and surrounding each link.
There are known techniques that uses linkage and content analysis for the purpose of performing information retrieval. In Chakrabarti et al., “Automatic Resource Compilation by Analyzing Hyperlink Structure and Associated Text,” In Proc. of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW7), pp. 65–74, Brisbane, Australia, 1998, and Silva et al., “Link-based and Content-Based Evidential Information in a Belief Network Model,” In Proc. of the 21st ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 96–103, Athens, Greece 2000, a combination of keywords and links is used to determine a ranking weight for retrieval results. However, neither reference makes any attempt to predict the usage of a web site based on user's information needs. They do not provide web site designers with an objective prediction that is useful in describing how the changes to a document or web page affect the way a user with a specific information need will traverse the site.